In the news analysis piece “A Determined Trump Vows Not to Be Thwarted at Home or Abroad,” David E. Sanger, who has covered five American presidents, writes of the beginning of Mr. Trump’s second term:
In his 29-minute inaugural address, Mr. Trump wasted no time on lofty appeals to American ideals. Instead, he spoke with a tone of aggression intended to be heard by domestic and foreign audiences as a warning that America under a more experienced Donald Trump will not take no for an answer.
He will end an era in which the world exploited American generosity, he said, empowering an “External Revenue Service” to “tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.”
After falsely declaring that China controls the American-built Panama Canal, he vowed, “We’re taking it back.” He hailed a presidential predecessor: not Washington or Jefferson or Lincoln, but William McKinley, the tariff-loving 25th president, who engaged in the Spanish-American War, seized the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico and paved the way for that canal.
And in the best McKinley spirit, he reinvigorated the idea of an America that will “pursue our manifest destiny,” a rallying call of the 1890s. This time, though, he described that destiny as an American settlement on Mars — a declaration that brought a thumbs up from Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who founded SpaceX with that goal in mind, and who has barely left the president’s side since Election Day.
Mr. Trump’s burst of executive orders was intended to send the message that this time the chaotic disruption that marked his first term would be married to rapid and more disciplined execution.
He began essentially shutting down the southern border to migrants and signaled his intention to challenge the constitutional principle of birthright citizenship.
He was scrapping restrictions on drilling and exporting oil and gas and withdrawing from the Paris climate accord again. Even with parts of Los Angeles still burning, there was no talk of climate change.
Federal funding of gender transition care was out. Federal forms, his aides told reporters, would be set back to a previous era, and allow people to check only “male” or “female.”
To anyone who watched Mr. Trump struggle through his first term, this combination of the substantive and the performative, with the gestures to his base, seemed familiar. The big difference, his aides suggest, is that this time he knows how to get it done, substantively as well as symbolically.
The New York Times interviewed people about their hopes and fears as Mr. Trump returns to power.
Robin C. Campbell, 49, who owns a small retail store in Asheville, N.C., said, “I have issues with him as a man but I will say, as much as I don’t like the guy, I think he runs America like a business and that’s what it is.” The article continues:
She said she did not vote in 2024 “for the first time in my life” because of disappointment with the Biden administration’s handling of the economy and her dislike of Donald J. Trump. But she hopes Mr. Trump will improve the economy: “I really, really am hopeful,” she said, to see where her business’s “numbers are two years from now, four years from now.”
Rev. Carol Thomas Cissel, 62, said, “It feels harsher. It feels scary for my family for my friends.” She adds: